Andrew has the right idea here it seems to me. I like languages and one of
the things a Hebrew professor and student of the Old Testament once said
was, "words are not points they are circles. Meaning can change over time."
Think of all the times you heard Shakespeare and had to translate English
into English. The sculptur who uses a lathe to make pieces to connect as
sculpture will call it sculpture while the turner would call the same thing
turning. Seems to me that both are right and I would rather be at the lathe
just making "stuff."

--
God bless and safe turning
Darrell Feltmate
Truro, NS Canada
http://aroundthewoods.com
http://roundopinions.blogspot.com
"Andrew Barss" wrote in message
...
Does anything at all rest on this question?



A lot of energy gets devoted to this sort of thing in the
craft/art/design world, and it seems to me the only useful
vrsion of it is if it's important to separate turning from sculpture,
like if you for some reason need to store one in a room separate from
another.
Which doesn't happen very often. Classification systems originate,
usually, as ways of organizing things (books in libraries, faculty
at a university, footgear in a store).

there is some objective, factual basis for classifiying natural
kinds of things into rigid categories (bananas are genetically different,
in defined ways, from slugs). But for all human-made things,
you run into the problem all the time that there jsut aren't rigid, crisp
boundaries between groups of things. Think about prosaic words,
like "furniture". Is a lamp a piece of furniture? Is an electric fan?
What about a shelf on a wall? There is no right answer to these
questions -- they just show how vague words are when you try to press the
point.


-- Andy Barss